This special session is being organized within the “14th International Work-Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (IWANN'2017) ” (http://iwann.uma.es/). IWANN'17 will be held in Cádiz, Spain, in June of 2017, and provides a discussion forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students about the latest ideas and realizations in the foundations, theory, models and applications of machine learning. We hope that this session can provide a common forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange their ideas and report their latest finding in the area of data imbalance.

*Topics of the special session*
Topics of the tentative special session include (but are not limited to):
• Learning in the context of imbalanced datasets
• Sampling approaches (synthetic over-sampling, under-sampling, etc.).
• Characterization of imbalanced datasets
• New classification models for imbalanced data
• New metrics for addressing and measuring data imbalance
• Applications with presence of data imbalance